Christine Todd Whitman, Former Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency:
Well, what it means is, you basically stopped doing research on new and potential problems for the public, for public health.
I mean, these are the people that have done all the research on plastics, showing how microorganisms or micro pieces of the plastic are now getting into the human food chain, and why it’s important that we start to deal with that. These are the people that are looking ahead.
I mean, when we had the anthrax attacks, there was no standard for what was safe, one spore of anthrax, 15 spores of anthrax. That came back to us. It was the EPA that set the standard. We set it at zero.
But the scientists followed that up to see, what is the safe standard? So these are people who are working every day to protect us and to look for new areas where we might have problems or things that we have seen as problematic in the past that are not so problematic now, that we figured out ways around them or they’re not as bad as we thought they might have been.
EPA has a very simple mission, as I’m sure Gina said, which is to protect human health and the environment. And these scientists are focused on doing just that, on making sure that we anticipate where there may be problems and to address them as quickly as we can with — based on science, emissions from cars, lead in pipes that gets into the drinking water.
EPA is the one who did the research to show the impact on children’s health and development, brain development, from lead in pipes and passed the regulations to reduce that. So it really has — and these scientists are the ones that have a very real impact on people’s everyday lives.
